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make test every PHP version and send feedback

Since David Coallier’s talk during PHPBenelux, I realized the importance of running make test on all PHP releases and send feedback to PHP.

It is so easy, that I will run it from now on every time a new release is announced.

If you’re running on Mac, you might want to install Xcode, so you can run “make” on command line. If you’re on Linux, you’re all set to go.

How to do it:

Open a shell

Create a directory (e.g. mkdir ~/src/php)

Download the latest version into the directory (e.g. wget http://downloads.php.net/stas/php-5.4.0RC6.tar.gz)

Untar the file (e.g. tar -xzf php-5.4.0RC6.tar.gz)

Go into the directory and run ./configure, you should get output like:checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /usr/bin/grep
checking for egrep... /usr/bin/grep -E
checking for a sed that does not truncate output... /usr/bin/sed
checking build system type... i386-apple-darwin11.2.0
checking host system type... i386-apple-darwin11.2.0
checking target system type... i386-apple-darwin11.2.0
...
Thank you for using PHP.

After that, you can run make and should get a lot of output ending in:Build complete.
Don't forget to run 'make test'.

After that, you should do as the previous command suggests and run make test. You should see all tests passing by.

After all tests are run, you will get a summary. In my case, I get the message: “You may have found a problem in PHP.”Bug #55509 (segfault on x86_64 using more than 2G memory) [Zend/tests/bug55509.phpt]
Sort with SORT_LOCALE_STRING [ext/standard/tests/array/locale_sort.phpt]

Whether you get an error or not, you should always send the report back to PHP. You can do that by just answering Y to the question: “Do you want to send this report now?”